Viewing posts tagged racism
In this episode, we make our first assault on the mountain of bullshit, bile, and batshittery that is Christopher 'the Crying Nazi' Cantwell, take a swing at the 'libertarian-to-fascist' pipeline, and rampant transphobia / transmisogyny.
As ever, warnings apply.
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Show Notes:
Cantwell's website
Radical Agenda
Outlaw Conservative
Random Cantwell audio clips
Cantwell stuff from A Voice For Men
Cantwell's warning to Kricket Slick's future boyfriends
Cantwell OkCupid profile, circa 2015
Ethan Glover on Cantwell's long history
The Free State Project
Daily Beast on the Libertarian to Alt-Right Pipeline
Reason repudiates the libertarian to alt-right pipeline
Jack's article on libertarianism as the 'gateway drug' to the alt-right
Jack's article on the Koch Brothers and their funding of right-wing academia
Cantwell on "Free-er Talk Live, Jan 17 2019."
Charlottesville Race and Terror
Vice checks in on Cantwell a year later
Cantwell arrest
Cantwell drunk in public
Cantwell pleads
Elmer Woodard, lawyer to Cantwell and the alt-right
Chris Cantwell pulls his gun, May 2015
Crying Nazi Raw Video
"The Free Keene Squad" on the Colbert Report
"Looking for Trouble With Strangers"
Local news story on the above
Right Wing ...
"There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism. Not even Doctor Who."
- Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ (quoted from memory)
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Where was I?
Oh yeah, it’s unfair to pick on ‘Talons of Weng-Chiang’ for being racist because all Doctor Who is racist.
So what do I mean by that?
Well, I don’t just mean that there are lots of stories in Doctor Who that contain implicit or explicit racist ideas, representations, or implications … though it does, and it might be worth going through some of them.
There’s ‘An Unearthly Child’, for instance, which associates ‘tribal’ life with brutishness and savagery, and suggests that tribal people need to be taught concepts like friendship and cooperation by enlightened Western liberals from technologically advanced societies… as if, historically, enlightened Western liberals from technologically advanced societies haven’t been the ones slaughtering tribal peoples. Native peoples, by the way, know what friendship and cooperation are. Sometimes better than us. And we are talking about native peoples in ‘Unearthly’. Because of Europeans’ historic encounters with native peoples as European imperialism and colonialism spread across the globe, we’ve come to associate the notion of ...
Thanks to the various people who looked over this and made suggestions, especially Holly. The mistakes are, of course, mine alone.
This post was originally going to have the alternative title ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to Doctor Who Fans About Race’ but Andrew Rilstone got there before me, damn his eyes. Seriously, go read Andrew’s post because it’s excellent. Amongst other things, he looks directly at the arguments put forward in Marcus Hearn’s Doctor Who Magazine editorial. Which is, of course, what started this.
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We live in a strange world. I’m being told, on the one hand, that Jeremy Corbyn, the most consistently and committedly anti-racist MP in the Commons, is an antisemite, and, on the other, that ‘Talons of Weng-Chiang’, a story in which a Fu Manchu style villain - played by a white actor in rubber ‘yellowface’ - abducts white women with the help of a Tong of “opium sodden” Chinese cultists working out of Limehouse, isn’t racist. You just know, don’t you, that some professional Doctor Who hacks are convinced that Corbyn, if elected, would institute Britain’s very own reenactment of the Final Solution, but will also quibble with you over whether or not Julius Silverstein ...
Like any emerging ideology, the alt-right didn’t just materialize out of nowhere. There were forerunners crying in the wilderness who were generally viewed as harmless kooks. “The paleo-libertarian seed that Ron Paul, Murray Rothbard, and Lew Rockwell planted in the 1990s has come to bear some really ugly fruit in the last couple of years as elements of the alt-right have made appearances in various libertarian organizations and venues,” writes Steve Horwitz, an economist who writes at Bleeding Heart Libertarians.
The Ron Paul Revolution might not have amounted to much electorally, but it would be wrong to underestimate the impact he has had on libertarianism and the alt-right. “In a way, Ron Paul is the guy who lit the fuse,” Nick Gillespie says. “And he embodies some of those contradictions [between libertarianism and the alt-right].” Gillespie tells me that Richard Spencer came up to him at the Republican National Convention in 2016 and said that he was activated into politics because of Paul. Gillespie sees Paul’s legacy as very mixed, as someone who was “simultaneously… positing this very libertarian worldview, but then he’s also speaking to people’s fears and anxieties.” If one were looking for the ...